Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

jaw sank down on his breast in the killing gape as he whooped for breath. Adrenaline surge and lack of oxygen sent gray across his eyes and narrowed his vision down to a tunnel. When a human moved at the corner of it, he whirled and began the upward gutting stroke with barred claws.

The motion froze. It was the human Jonah, and he stood calmly in the position of respectful-nonaggression, with no smell of fear. His teeth were decently concealed. Slowly, slowly, willpower beat down the aching need to kill and the rage-shame of mockery. The loafers had tumbled backward at the blurring-swift kzin leap that left Spots back on his feet, though some of the children had cried out in delight as at a wonder. Spots's pelt sank back toward normal, and he forced his ears to unfold, his tail to relax. Jonah bent and picked up the saddle and its blanket pad.

"Shall we do this together?" he said in an even voice. "I wouldn't care to be kicked by that thing, myself—I don't have cartilage armor across my middle the way you Heroes do."

Stiffly, Spots's ears waggled; the equivalent of a forced smile. "Mine is not in very good condition, at the moment. How shall we approach?"

"One on either side," Jonah said. "We shouldn't give him a target."

* * *

"Hrraaaeeeeeeee!" Bigs shrieked and leapt.

The gagrumpher froze for a fatal instant, its six legs tensed and head whipping backward, then spurted forward in a desperate bound. Spots rose out of the underbrush almost at its feet and lunged for the exposed throat, fastening himself with clawed hands and feet to the big animal and sinking his fangs into its throat. Blood bubbled between his teeth, hot and salty and spicy across his tongue, but he concentrated on squeezing his jaws shut. Air wheezed through the punctured windpipe and he gave a grunt of triumph as it closed beneath the bone-cracking pressure of his grip. Suffocation killed the prey, when you got a good throat-hold. The animal collapsed by the forelegs, then went over on its side with a thump as Bigs arrived and threw his massive form against its hindquarters. A few seconds more and it kicked and died.

They crouched for a moment, panting, forepaw-hands on the warm body. The soft night echoed to the throbbing killscream of triumph, and then they settled down to the enjoyable task of butchering and eating. Spots cuffed affectionately at his sibling as they ripped open the body cavity and squabbled over hearts—gagrumphers had two, one major and one secondary, like most Wunderland higher life-forms—and liver. It was a big beast, twice the weight of an adult male kzin, half a human ton, but they made an appreciable dint in it, before feeling replete enough to pile the remainder in torn-off segments of hide; it would be fresh enough to eat for a couple of days. With the chore done they could lie at leisure, cracking bones for marrow with rocks and the hilts of their wtsai-knives, nibbling at treats of organ and tripe, grooming the blood and bits out of each other's fur.

"It is well, it is well," Bigs crooned, working over the hard-to-reach places at the back of his sibling's neck. It was amazing where the blood got to, when you stuck your head into the prey's abdominal cavity.

"It is well," Spots confirmed, yawning cavernously. "If I never eat synthetic protein again, it will be far too soon. Nothing is lacking but ice cream, or some bourbon with milk."

"Your pride-mate provides," Bigs announced, unslinging a canteen and two flat dishes that collapsed against it, "The bourbon, at least."

A throaty purr resounded from both throats. This is how the Fanged God meant kzinti to live, Spots thought. The night was bright to their sight, full of interesting scents; a gratifying hush of terror was only gradually wearing off, as the native life reacted to the roar of hunting kzin.

It was how kzin had lived, for scores of scores of millennia, on the savannahs and in the jungles of Kzin itself. The scent of his brother was rich and comforting with their common blood. So had young warriors lived in the wandering years, cast out by their fathers and the home pride. They grouped together in the wastelands, brothers and half-brothers and cousins, growing strong in comradeship and skill, until they could raid the settled bands for females of their own—or even displace their fathers and become lords in their own right. From those bonds sprang the pride and the clan, foundations of kzinti culture. So had the Heroic Race lived through the long slow rise to sentience, through all the endless hunting time. Before iron and fire, before the first ranches. Long, long before the Jotoki came from space, with their two-edged gifts of technology and education to hire orange-furred mercenaries.

"I scent a path that might have been," Spots mused, over a second drink. "If the Jotok had never come to Kzin-home, would we ever have been more than wandering hunters, with castle-dwelling ranchers as the height of our civilization? My liver trembles with ambiguity—perhaps that would have been best?"

"And miss the Endless Hunt?" his more conventional sibling retorted. "The flesh of these excellent gagrumphers?"

"The Endless Hunt is endless time spent in spaceships and habitats, living on synthetic meat, never feeling wind in your fur," Spots replied. They had both done tours of duty offplanet during the war, and served longer in fortresses on the surface that might as well have been battlecraft. "And living among aliens."

"The Fanged God created them to serve us," Bigs said reasonably, rolling onto his back in the gesture of relaxed trust and looking at Spots upside-down. "Thus freeing the Heroes for the honorable path of war."

"So said the Conservors of the Patriarchal Past," Spots said, with a sardonic wave of his bat-wing ears. "You will note that there are few of them around. We lost this war."

Bigs's posture grew slightly rigid. "My nose is dry with